The Biodiversity Heritage Library improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.
BHL also serves as the literature component of the Encyclopedia of Life .

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is committed to continuously improving access and discoverability of the open access biodiversity literature and archives available at https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/. Thanks to the input of numerous BHL users, partners, and other stakeholders, BHL has identified a number of top priorities to enhance the user experience. As we have a very small team of dedicated staff for technical development efforts, we must focus our limited resources on one or two priorities at a time. Our current top two technical priorities are implementing full text search and incorporating already transcribed files collected through partner projects using tools such as the Smithsonian Transcription Center, FromThePage, and DigiVol.

We have been very pleased that others in the community have expressed interest not only in seeing these and other enhancements happen but some have also offered to contribute their time and expertise. Although our small staff and current priorities prevent us from pursuing most collaborative efforts, we do welcome any and all suggestions and will review them as time allows. These can be especially important as we move to new priorities in the future. We also encourage anyone to download and use BHL data and content for their own projects and to let us know what you are working on. To share technical recommendations or the results of your own work processing or improving BHL data, please contact us: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/contact#/comments